Railroad vehicles require wheels having a flanged rim for lateral guidance. The flange glides on a side surface of the rail. On the other hand, wheel-supported vehicles having flangeless wheels for lateral guidance require vertical guide surfaces on which steering rollers having vertical rotational axes act in order to function either as a sensor to provide the desired steering information or, as a steering means per se to forcibly maintain the vehicle in its predetermined path. The guide surfaces can, for example, be provided at the edges of the roadway structure. The special roadway therefore has a trough-like shape and includes a horizontal roadway surface and two guiding surfaces arranged laterally of the latter. The guiding surfaces are defined by so-called guide rails.
If the special roadway is to be crossed at grade level as for example by a street, it is necessary in this region to be able to remove the guide rails temporarily. Since the laterally guided wheel-supported vehicle can also be manually steered without the guide rail in the manner of a conventional street vehicle, it would appear possible to temporarily remove the guide rails over a certain length of the special roadway in order to permit the egress and ingress of this guided vehicle.
With existing roadways for laterally-guided wheel-supported vehicles, the guide rails have simply been omitted at the region where conventional streets cross the special roadway. At these locations, the speed of the laterally guided vehicle must be greatly reduced. In addition, such regions without the guide rails constitute a safety hazard. Speed reductions and safety risk reduce the specific advantages of such laterally guided vehicles.
The temporary removal of the guide rails could be performed by disassembling the same in a conventional manner; however, this would be much too difficult and take too much time under normal circumstances.
Another solution would be to configure the guide rail as a gate crossing either vertical or horizontal. However, this would probably not be workable because the distance over which the guide rails would have to be removed is too great and the guide rails configured in this manner would no longer be able to take up the lateral forces developed by the guided vehicle.
The assignee of this application has for some time now been engaged in the development of special roadway configurations for laterally-guided, wheel-supported vehicles. The required dimensional accuracy of the roadway to achieve a high level of travel comfort has lead to configurations which are assembled from factory finished parts and can be compared to roadways for rail vehicles, namely roadways made up of rails and ties. From this, special requirements have been recognized which should also be met by recessible guide rails.
One solution is disclosed in DE-OS No. 31 50 571 of the assignee wherein recessible guide rails of a desired length are disclosed which are put together from a number of relatively short channel-like components arranged one behind the other. The recessible guide rail and the mechanisms needed to move the guide rail constitute a unit. Because of the mechanism which is accommodated in the profile of the guide rail, this configuration is relatively complicated and expensive.
If one starts with the premise that one of the advantages of this construction lies in being able to utilize a single unit, then guide rails are only possible wherein the total length of the guide rail is dividable by the length of the single unit. However, in practice, this limitation can cause problems. For example, it is often desired to have the possibility of putting together recessible guide rails made up of components of various lengths. Such a situation could be where the recessible guide rail is used for a portion of a switch assembly.